How could a chat bot learn synonyms?
This answer describes the "word vector" toolkit in NLP. The result of analyzing a large corpus to find words that occur in similar context provides dense vectors for each word that can then be used for similarity. For bots, the goal is generally a similarity and not exact synonyms. Synonyms can be hard-coded using WordNet if needed. For your greeting question, following blog post can help: Do-it-yourself NLP for bot developers.